The modern office, you know, was a fairly recent invention. It wasn’t until the early years of the 20th Century that we saw a tremendous growth in what was known from 1919 as “white collar” work , which was the early clerical and administrative work of the earliest office workers. Industrialists in the US such as Rockefeller birthed the modern corporation, and, of course, with it came the modern concept of an office. The function of the modern office was simple – to bring people together to work in a controllable manner.
Yet before that, white collar workers were used to working in very different places, “servicescapes” where they were customers, not confined to any cultural expectations, or clocking in and out, or being watched by the boss and your colleagues.
“Samuel Pepys was an early example of a mobile worker”, notes Frank Duffy in his book, Work and the City. Reading Pepys’ diary shows the 17th Century diarist and civil servant regularly working in a variety of locations, including his home, his office, the shipyards, Whitehall, and a variety of taverns in between meetings.
In fact, typical entries show him barely sitting still all day, visiting a vast variety of locations daily in the course of his business, including, of course, the coffee house.
The Coffee House as a Place of Work
“At the Coffee-house … Gifford, Hubland, the Master of the ship, and I read over and approved a charter-party for carrying goods for Tangier, wherein I hope to get some money. Thence home, my head akeing for want of rest and too much business.” – Samuel Pepys Diary, 2 February 1664/65
The Coffee House of the 17th and 18th Centuries was much as your local Starbucks is today: a centre for local merchants and businessmen to gather between other meetings, a place to meet and, importantly, exchange news.
Before the arrival of the printing press, this was where news flowed first, and as such different coffee houses began to become specialised amongst their clientele. So Edward Lloyd, from the late 1680s onwards, catered to his coffee house customers by providing shipping news, creating a place where ship-owners and merchants could meet to deal in insurance – later, of course, evolving into the world renowned Lloyds of London.
Similarly, Covent Garden coffee house Rawthmells was the location of the founding of the “Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce” by William Shipley in 1754, known more widely as the Royal Society of Arts, or RSA.
The coffee houses, says Timothy Bakken, in his report “Cultivating Civilization: The Age of the English Coffee House” were a crucial institution as England went through a transition from a dispersed, disorganized medieval existence to an age of industry, rationality, and improved government, open to men of all classes and providing a forum for engaging in business, politics and pleasure. Aside from Lloyds and Rawthmells, other coffee houses catered for actors, doctors, lawyers, thieves, booksellers, Quakers, Free Masons and even prostitutes, to the degree that in a medical emergency, noted WS Lewis, a patient would send to a coffee house to summon a physician.
Deals were done, stocks sold, property transferred, slaves bought, newspapers were read, post was received and advertisements answered, but the coffee house reign as the premier place of business was soon to die out.
The introduction of street letter boxes led to their demise as mini post offices, newspapers became affordable due to advances in printing technology during the Industrial Revolution, and the coffee house became less important as centres for news.
As society moved into the suburbs, the coffee house started to be replaced by several other key social building types. With increased travel came the rise of the hotel. The restaurant, as we know it today, was born in Paris as the Grand Taverne de Londres (the “Great Tavern of London”), founded 1782 and became increasingly popular across the Channel. Interestingly, the restaurant described by Britannica as the most illustrious of all those in Paris in the 19th century was the Café Anglais – the “English coffee-shop”.
But most importantly, as far as work was concerned, was the birth and rise of the gentlemen’s club.
The Club as a Place of Work
From the late 18th century, the gentlemen’s club became one of the main alternatives to the coffee house, initially mainly for the aristocracy. Rising in prominence and influence during the early 19th Century as a more closed version of the coffee house, like the coffee houses they were populated by professions, societies, or interest groups, but with the ability to refuse membership to “unclubbables”, as Samuel Johnson called them.
The clubs acted as second homes for pleasure and gambling, business and politics, providing upper- and upper-middle-class men with modest incomes to spend their time in the type of grand surroundings they could not personally afford for their own homes.
Many of the more aristocratic clubs, however, acted to ban business from their premises, with rule books discouraging the discussion of business (with the exception of politics). Many of these clubs still exist, but many of the professional clubs also waned as the Industrial Revolution weaved its course.
The Resurrection of the Mobile Worker
It is worth bearing in mind that those engaged in business in the coffee houses and gentlemen’s clubs were higher in “class” than the average working man. Indeed, in the primarily Agrarian economy that preceded the Industrial Revolution, much of the working population still worked the land. But we eventually saw a shift from the land to blue-collar industrial workers, and from there on to white collar workers: and we all started to go to the office.
It wasn’t until 1992, when the world wide web was born, that the nature of work began to change again. Opinion and ideas began to spread faster, access to knowledge and information was hugely increased, and global, mass communication through emailing, messaging or (nearly 15 years later) social media became instantaneous. The “Information Revolution” has had a profound effect on the type of work we do, and the type of workplace we work from.
As Tom Peters says, “During the age of mass production … the human hand rather than the human head was the primary work tool. In the craft tradition that preceded the Industrial Revolution, the head reigned supreme. Now we’re back to head work, with a vengeance.”
This demands a flatter hierarchical structure to allow decisions to be quickly made and for people to work independently. Employees are increasingly judged by output, not by time in a fixed space, and do not need to work in the same location – or even country – as their line manager.
Less jobs now require working just from the office, bringing back a level of flexibility and mobility to the average worker somewhat reminiscent of Pepy’s typical day. Laptops, of course, are now cheaper than desktops, and organisations are increasingly choosing them even for workers who are in the office most of the time.
As organisations seek flexibility, few companies now own their buildings outright. The larger ones, such as IBM or BT, have sold their premises and leased them back. But more so, there has been a shift towards organisations more short-term leases instead, and now even these have become increasingly inefficient. Less than 40% of an employee’s time is judged to be spent at a desk – today’s office worker is increasingly mobile, even around the office.
Yet real mobility can be seen from the increase in people working from two customer centred servicescapes: the café, and the club.
The Resurrection of the Coffee House and Club
“In a world where technology enables you to work from anywhere, you will still have to work from somewhere. Choice will be determined by convenience, access to people and amenities, and the desire for stimulating experiences in meaningful places.” - Despina Katsikakis, New Real Estate Models to Support Distributed Working
Convenience, access and stimulating experiences in meaningful places? Where else but the coffee shop?
Though independent cafes began to flourish after the second world war, it was in 1971, with the founding of Starbucks in Seattle, USA, that we saw a societal shift. Only opening in the UK in 1998, within two years it saw sales of 4.4m cups a day. It has not only grown worldwide to some 16,000 branches, but has opened the door to a host of other branded competitors, such as Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero.
In March 2008, the Times proclaimed we were seeing the “Rise of the New Nomadics”, the generation of workers increasingly working from coffee shops. Now, go into any coffee shop and you will see laptops open, meetings and even interviews taking place.
Yet, as the article itself notes, the coffee house is not perfect. We are still constrained by our need for electricity. It’s very public nature means solo working is difficult: you can’t just get up and go to the bathroom, leaving all your contents out. And they are clearly not designed for business. Most cafes aim to give a social, relaxed feel, with soft jazz music, the roar of expresso, small round tables you can’t get two laptops on, and absolutely no acoustic privacy whatsoever.
And so, there has been a shift towards locations more supportive of these needs. Hotel lobbies, designed well, can increasingly offer the space and “business feel” nomadic workers crave, although few hotels take a strategic approach to this.
This in turn has led to the resurrection of the club as a place for business. From Soho House to One Alfred Place, there are increasingly a number of locations where plugging in, powering on, meeting colleagues and clients and feeling safe to leave your work around is possible. Membership access and a reception create that sense of security, and revenue is in the form of both fees, and food/beverages.
What Will the Future Hold?
We predict several key trends for nomadic servicescapes:
- Cafes will increasingly seek to accommodate business users, but may need a change in business model to do so. As Starbucks reportedly begin to “pull the plug: on nomadic workers, we expect more tailored solutions to emerge. Already, UK initatives like Central Working are starting to provide a mix of business cafe and meeting space;
- Hotels will provide more touchdown and informal meeting space to increase beverage sales by attracting nomads, whilst catering better for the business user by creating spaces for workshops that are not just boring, bland meeting rooms with a flipchart;
- New types of clubs and privileged access spaces will evolve to support nomadic customers who don’t want to take leases.
We also think change, however, will be slow until a major brand decides to do this, and do it well. At the moment most major brands in each of these sectors (and the serviced office sector) are tinkering with the idea of supporting business users better, but either executing it poorly or doing it well, but not at scale. Who will be the first to achieve both?
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